The European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, now in its 25th "Silver Jubilee" edition, was initially established by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS-IRSG) under the name "Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research", and always held in the United Kingdom until 1997. Since 1998 the location of the colloquium has alternated between the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, in order to reflect the growing European orientation of the event. For the same reason, in 2001 the event was renamed "European Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research". Since 2002, the proceedings of the Colloquium are being published by Springer Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.